Six Relics and No Engine: Why Relics Multiply Instead of Add
Here is a familiar run autopsy. Two players draft nearly the same Silent deck: Noxious Fumes, some Poison stackers, a Catalyst, defensive commons. One finishes the act comfortably; the other limps into the boss and dies on the debuff turn. The relic screens differ by exactly one pick. The dead player took a pile of standalone trinkets that each did something. The living player took fewer relics that did something to each other. Relics in StS2 are not additive stat sticks. Almost every entry in the 42-relic pool has two prices and two values: what it does with nothing (its floor) and what it does alongside your best card (its ceiling), and reading that second number is the entire skill.
Anchor makes the contrast clean. Its text is 10 Block at the start of each combat, the plainest relic in the database. The floor: it absorbs one mid-hit for free, always online. The ceiling: on a deck whose turn-one plan is playing a 3-cost power (Demon Form, Genesis, Corruption), Anchor is 10 Block you did not have to spend a card or a mana on, which is exactly what lets you open with the power instead of a Defend. Same relic, twice the value, and the difference is written in your deck list, not in the relic text.
The tier system in our database encodes exactly this two-axis reading. Tier S (take on sight) means high floor and high ceiling across most decks: Lantern, Gremlin Horn, Ice Cream, Pantograph. Tier A means strong for most decks but with real deck-dependence: Astrolabe, Bag of Preparation, Bag of Marbles, Snecko Eye, Sai. The fourteen unlisted entries, the B-band, are not bad: they are narrow, and narrow relics swing from dead weight to build-defining on the strength of one synergy. Charon's Ashes sits outside the tier table entirely, and in a Corruption deck it is flatly better than most tier S pickups, because 3 damage to ALL enemies per exhausted card, times five or more exhausts a turn, is a free damage engine stapled to a deck that was going to exhaust those cards anyway.
So the practical habit to build in v0.111: when a relic drops, do not ask is this relic good. Ask two questions. What does it do on turn one of a fight where my draw bricked, and what does it do on the turn my engine goes off. A relic that answers the first question is consistency, buy it when the run feels fragile. A relic that answers the second is a multiplier, buy it when the engine is real and one piece short of running away with the game. The rest of this guide is the 42-relic pool sorted by those answers, family by family, with the specific pairings that turn floor relics into ceiling relics and the traps where two good relics quietly cancel each other.
How to Read the 42-Relic Pool: Tiers, Sources and Win-Rate Data
The current database tracks 42 relics: 19 tier S, 9 tier A, and 14 narrow or unlisted entries. Knowing where each one comes from is half of routing, because sources determine what you can actually shop for versus what you must be given.
By source, the pool splits four ways. Elites are the primary faucet: the S-band entries they can hand you include Lantern, Strawberry, Festive Popper, Gremlin Horn, Mercury Hourglass, Pantograph, Pen Nib, Red Mask, Pear, Ice Cream, Unceasing Top and Gambling Chip. Shops hold their own exclusive shelf: Brimstone (the Strength relic), Membership Card (50 percent off everything) and Alchemical Coffer (fill all 4 potion slots), all tagged Shop rarity, which makes shop paths a relic strategy and not just a gold sink. The Ancient tier is the third source, 11 entries: Ectoplasm, Black Star, Astrolabe, Brilliant Scarf, Calling Bell, Diamond Diadem, Fiddle, Snecko Eye, Sai, Yummy Cookie and Arcane Scroll. Ancients replace StS1's boss relics as NPCs who offer Blessings at act start, so your biggest relic decisions arrive on a schedule you can plan around. The fourth source is events: Trash Heap's dig option trades HP for a unique legacy-pool relic, and Wongo's sells relic tickets and specific rares.
The community ladder data attached to several entries is worth more than any opinion. Snecko Eye (draw 2 extra at turn start, start each combat Confused) carries a 93.8 percent win rate on the Ancient Elo ladder, highest of any Ancient, while being picked only 13.1 percent of the time. That gap, enormous win rate, tiny pick rate, is the single clearest signal in the dataset: players systematically underrate it, and the tier list is built to correct that. Sai sits at 92.3 percent, 7 Block every turn, no condition. Yummy Cookie posts a 40.9 percent win rate with a 69.9 percent pick rate, meaning players already love it and it still performs. Arcane Scroll is the runaway number one overall: a free random rare card, take on sight, because card quality compounds the same way relics do.
Two caveats keep the data honest. Win rates measure the runs a relic appears in, so Ancient relics look inflated by reaching strong late-game decks in the first place, and the game is in Early Access: v0.106 reworked Infested Prism and buffed Mummified Hand, v0.107 rebalanced up to 84 cards, and any given number can move in the next beta patch. The stable reading is directional, not decimal: conditional draw and block engines are the highest-performing relic class in StS2, and raw gold or single-fight trinkets are the lowest. Every family section that follows leans on that direction.
The Economy Family: Black Star, Membership Card and the Gold Pipeline
Economy relics do not win fights directly, they buy the things that win fights, and the four entries in this family define different currencies. Black Star (Ancient, tier S) makes every elite drop an additional relic. Membership Card (Shop) halves every shop price. Ectoplasm (Ancient, tier S) grants +1 energy every turn and disables all gold gain. Alchemical Coffer (Shop) fills all 4 potion slots instantly. Learn what each one converts, because they conflict with each other more than any other family.
Black Star is the snowball head of the pool. One additional relic per elite does not sound like much until you price it against a route: an Act 2 map with three elites on the path turns into six relic drops, and each of those relics compounds into the next fight's HP savings, which funds more elites. Its own text is the strategy: the earlier you take it, the harder it snowballs. If Black Star is offered at an Ancient blessing early in a run where the map shows an elite-dense Act 2, it is close to an auto-pick, and it retroactively justifies the aggressive elite pathing every guide preaches. Black Star plus Gremlin Horn in the same run is the classic flywheel: more elites, more relics, more resources per fight, more HP to spend on more elites.
Membership Card is a time-value bet. Halving every future shop price pays out once per shop visit, so its value equals roughly half of your remaining shop spending, which means it is strongest the instant you buy it and decays every floor you delay. On a run planning heavy shop usage (relic purchases, removal service for your Strikes, potion refills), an early Membership Card can be worth several hundred gold. The trap: it does nothing for decks that never see shops, and it pairs badly with the next relic.
Ectoplasm is the pipeline closer. +1 energy every turn for the rest of the run is the strongest flat effect in the game, and it is priced by deleting your gold income forever. Two consequences follow. First, Ectoplasm and Membership Card are an explicit anti-combo: one removes your ability to pay, the other discounts prices you can no longer afford, so if Ectoplasm arrives first, Membership Card is nearly dead weight, and shops in general lose most of their pull. Second, Ectoplasm is best taken when your deck wants tempo now rather than compounding later: an engine deck that turns extra energy into extra cards played (Alignment conversions, Corruption turns) extracts far more than a deck still missing pieces that gold would have bought. Taking Ectoplasm is a declaration that your current deck is the deck.
Alchemical Coffer is the potion economy in one purchase: four filled slots before a boss is four fight-warping consumables, from a Block Potion covering Soul Nexus's 29 opener to a Fairy in a Bottle buying a full extra life against The Queen. Eternal Feather rounds out the family from the other direction, healing 3 HP per 5 deck cards at rest sites, which pays 18 HP per campfire on a 30-card deck and almost nothing on a 15-card one: a relic that rewards the exact deck bloat this site's thinning guide tells you to avoid.
The Defense Floor: Anchor, Sai, Red Mask and the Right to Be Greedy
Defense relics look boring and behave like leverage, because every point of reliable block converts into HP you are free to spend on elites, events and upgrades. This is the family that buys the rest of your run.
Anchor (tier A, Common) starts each combat with 10 Block. The floor is real on every floor of every act: it absorbs one mid-hit, always online. The ceiling is tempo: on decks that want turn one for a 3-cost power, Anchor is the Block that pays for it, and it covers the exact turn most decks are most exposed. Sai (tier A, Ancient) gives 7 Block at the start of every turn instead, 92.3 percent win rate on the community ladder, and it quietly deletes 7 damage from every attack in the game: against Mecha Knight's fixed loop (25, Burns, Windup, 35), Sai alone covers a third of the Charge turn and a fifth of the Heavy Cleave, before you play a single card. Red Mask (tier S, Uncommon) applies 1 Weak to ALL enemies at combat start, which is a 25 percent cut to every attack every enemy makes all fight. Against multi-hit patterns, Maelstrom's four hits, Soul Flame's three, Lash's four, that single Weak stack reduces every instance, making Red Mask one of the best elite-fight relics in the pool for one uncommon slot.
Pantograph (tier S, Uncommon) heals 25 HP at the start of boss combats, which is not defense during a fight but defense across the map: with Pantograph in hand, every HP point above your survival floor is spendable greed on the final elite stretch, because the boss refunds 25 of it. Beating Remnant (Rare) caps your per-turn HP loss at 20, the anti-one-shot insurance that high Ascension runs are built around, and it pairs with Intangible sources (Wraith Form) to make whole enemy turns cost 1 or 2 HP total. Gorget starts each combat with 4 Plating that decays 1 per turn, strongest exactly into the multi-hit elites that open fast: four separate hits each get shaved, which is why Plating and Red Mask stack so well on the same fight. Lizard Tail (Rare) revives you once per run at half max HP, an extra life that changes which risks are rational, much like holding a Fairy in a Bottle you can never be forced to drink.
Diamond Diadem (Ancient) is the family's oddball: if you play 2 or fewer cards in a turn, you take half damage from enemies. On a fast Sly deck it is close to blank. On a slow control shell that plays one big Block and one big attack per turn, it halves the entire game's damage output, and it pairs naturally with Fiddle (draw 2 extra at turn start, then no more draws that turn), which builds the same two-card rhythm. That pairing, two mid-table relics fusing into a halved-damage game plan, is the clearest single example of why synergy tiers outrank raw tiers: neither relic is listed S, and together they beat most relics that are.
Draw and Consistency: Gambling Chip, Bag of Preparation and the Underrated Snecko Eye
Draw relics attack the single most common way runs die: the wrong five cards at the wrong time. This family has the highest community win rates in the pool and the most ordering interactions, so it rewards knowing exactly what each entry fixes.
Bag of Preparation (tier A, Common) draws 2 extra cards on turn one. Five cards become seven, and the practical effect is that your opening hand contains your opening plan far more often: engines find their engine card, answer decks find the answer. It is cheap, unconditional, and it is at its best in decks with one or two cards the whole fight depends on, exactly the thin, focused decks the thinning guide builds. Gambling Chip (tier S, Rare) does the same job with player agency: at the start of each combat, discard any number of cards and draw that many. On a deck with situational cards (Intangible answers, specific block cards, situational finishers), the Chip converts a dead opening into a live one, and it is strongest when your deck has cards that are great later but dead on turn one, which describes nearly every Ethereal and every 3-cost power in the game.
Bellows (Uncommon, a new StS2 face) upgrades the first hand you draw each combat, a free Blessing-of-the-Forge-style swing every fight. The pairing with Gambling Chip deserves attention: the Chip redraw happens at combat start, so plan your keep-or-toss around which upgraded cards you already hold. Unceasing Top (tier S, Rare) draws 1 card whenever your hand is empty during your turn, which is a draw engine disguised as a consistency tool: fast-cycling decks that dump their hand (Claw chains, Shiv spam, Soul tokens) get a running refill, and the Top effectively shrinks the deck's cycle time the more aggressively you play.
Centennial Puzzle (Common) draws 3 the first time you lose HP each combat. On paper that is a consolation prize; in practice, against elites it is a refund, you were going to leak damage somewhere, and the Puzzle converts that leak into gas. Fiddle (Ancient) is the family's cautionary tale: 2 extra cards at turn start, but you cannot draw any more that turn, which is actively hostile to draw engines built on Acrobatics or Prophesize. Take Fiddle for decks that want a fixed seven-card hand and hate it in exactly the decks that want everything else in this family.
Snecko Eye (tier A, Ancient) closes the family and tops the data: draw 2 extra at turn start, begin each combat Confused, with a 93.8 percent win rate against a 13.1 percent pick rate. Confused randomizes your card costs each turn, and the reason the Eye wins anyway is that randomization around 0-cost and cheap decks barely hurts, while decks full of expensive cards (3-cost powers, Prophesize, Tempest, Echo Form) gain enormous average discounts. The rule falls out of the math: the Eye is excellent in expensive decks, fine in average decks, and pointless in a Claw deck where nothing costs anything to begin with.
Energy Relics: Lantern, Ice Cream, Brilliant Scarf and Ectoplasm
Energy is the multiplier on every other subsystem: extra energy plays more cards, which draws more cards, which finds your engine sooner, which shortens every fight. The pool prices energy four different ways, and matching the price to your deck is the whole decision.
Lantern (tier S, Common) grants 1 additional energy on the first turn of each combat. That is a one-turn boost with permanent consequences, because turn one is where powers go down and where fights are decided in miniature: Demon Form, Genesis, Corruption and Noxious Fumes all want the earliest possible deployment, and Lantern is a common that effectively lets a 3-cost power land on turn one alongside a normal play. The database rates it S despite the single-turn text, and the rating is correct for the current meta, where early scaling decides elites like Bygone Effigy and Infested Prism. Ice Cream (tier S, Rare) conserves energy between turns, the highest-ceiling energy relic in the game and a consensus S. Banking changes how entire archetypes play: Tempest becomes a two-turn X-cost nuke, Alignment can hold Stars and energy for one conversion turn, Adrenaline's refund stops being wasted, and any deck with expensive burst (Echo Form turns, Corruption turns, Seven Stars turns) gets to assemble it instead of hoping to topdeck it. Ice Cream's floor is low on decks that spend everything every turn, which is why it is a ceiling relic first: its value scales with your ability to plan two turns ahead.
Brilliant Scarf (tier A, Ancient) makes the 5th card you play each turn free. Read it as a conditional energy relic that demands card volume: Sly Discard decks resolving 5-plus cards a turn, Claw chains, Shiv packages and Soul engines get a free card every turn, while control decks playing three cards a turn get literally nothing, one of the steepest deck-dependence curves in the pool. The Scarf also has a hidden sequencing texture: once you own it, playing your cheap cards first and saving the expensive fifth slot converts it into raw mana every single turn.
Ectoplasm (tier S, Ancient) returns to this family because it is the purest energy relic of all, +1 every turn, every fight, forever, and it was covered under economy for the gold-half of its price. From the energy side the analysis is simpler and harsher: Ectoplasm is the only permanent energy in the pool, it stacks with nothing (because nothing else is permanent), and it is at its weakest in decks that already generate energy internally (Tactician discards, Alignment conversions, Adrenaline), where the fourth energy point often goes unspent while the gold would have bought relics or removals. Before taking any energy relic, count your deck's average cost and your deck's energy sinks: the relic that wins is the one your curve can actually absorb, and the one that looks shiniest is frequently the one you cannot.
Damage Amp: Pen Nib, Mercury Hourglass, Razor Tooth and Bag of Marbles
Damage relics run on a simple rule: flat damage scales with fight length, percentage damage scales with your deck's output, and the best relic in any slot is whichever multiplies what you already do most. Four patterns cover the family.
Flat chip damage first. Festive Popper (tier S, Common) deals 9 damage to ALL enemies at the start of each combat, a new StS2 face the community immediately rated S because it deletes a third of early normal fights before they start and chunks elite boards: Phrog Parasite's four Wrigglers and Entomancer's bees all open into a Popper blast. Mercury Hourglass (tier S, Uncommon) deals 3 damage to ALL enemies at the start of your turn, every turn, all run: against a five-turn multi-body elite that is 15 free damage per body, and it stacks multiplicatively with Noxious Fumes ticking poison on the same bodies. Akabeko (Uncommon) grants 8 Vigor at combat start, adding 8 to your next attack, so plan for it to land on your first real swing of each fight.
Percentage amplification next. Pen Nib (tier S, Uncommon) makes every 10th Attack you play deal double damage. The play pattern is countable: track your attacks, dump cheap ones, and land the tenth on your biggest swing or a multi-hit finisher, turning Whirlwind or a buffed Body Slam into a scheduled execution. Bag of Marbles (tier A, Uncommon) applies 1 Vulnerable to all enemies at combat start, a free +50 percent team-wide damage window on turn one of every fight, and it multiplies with the character-locked Paper Phrog (below), where the same stack becomes +75 percent. Razor Tooth (tier S, Rare) upgrades every Attack or Skill you play for the rest of the combat, a snowball: decks that play many cards (Claw chains playing ten-plus cards a turn) have their whole kit effectively upgraded by turn three, which is why Claw decks rate Razor Tooth among the best relics in the game.
Rainbow Ring (tier S, Rare) grants +1 Strength and +1 Dexterity the first time each turn you play an Attack, a Skill and a Power. Balanced decks that naturally cycle all three types bank +2/+2 per turn; decks that spam one type get nothing, making it the purest deck-shape relic in the family. Brimstone (tier S, Shop) gives you +2 Strength per turn and all enemies +1: in a race-oriented Strength Ironclad with Demon Form and Limit Break, your scaling outpaces the enemy bonus within two turns, and the drawback becomes irrelevant against enemies that die before it matters. It is a shop relic, which means you choose it with gold in hand, and you should only ever buy it into a deck already committed to racing.
The family's one caution: flat damage and percentage amp pull deck-building in opposite directions. Hourglass rewards you for surviving longer, Pen Nib and Brimstone reward you for ending fights faster, and stacking both mindlessly means your incentives are split. Pick the lane your block engine already supports.
Four Engines That Break the Game: Ashes, Horn Chains, the Poison Skull and Banked Stars
Single synergies improve a deck. Cross-family stacks become engines, and four of them are strong enough in v0.111 to define entire runs. Each is listed with its minimum piece count, because engines only pay once every piece is present.
Engine one: the Ashes grinder. Charon's Ashes (Rare, unlisted tier) deals 3 damage to ALL enemies whenever you Exhaust a card. Corruption makes every Skill free but Exhausted, so a normal Corruption turn, five or six skills played, becomes 15 to 18 free area damage. True Grit and the Burns that Mecha Knight shoves into your hand are additional fuel, and Feel No Pain converts the same exhausts into Block while Dark Embrace converts them into draws. One relic turns a defensive engine's exhaust cost into its damage output, which is why an unlisted-tier relic is the best pickup in the game for one specific deck: the floor was low, but the ceiling was another whole win condition. Minimum pieces: Corruption plus any two exhaust enablers.
Engine two: the Horn chain. Gremlin Horn (tier S) grants 1 energy and 1 draw whenever an enemy dies. Festive Popper (9 to all at combat start) and Mercury Hourglass (3 to all per turn) kill small bodies from full boards, and every death refunds energy and cards that find more AoE. Against Phrog Parasite's four Wrigglers or Entomancer's bees, the loop is: relic chip kills a body, Horn pays a card and a mana, that card kills another body. Two relics convert multi-enemy fights from the most dangerous fights in the game into your personal draw engine, and they are why AoE relics have elevated win rates despite looking like chip damage.
Engine three: the Poison Skull. Snecko Skull (tier A, Silent) applies 1 additional Poison stack whenever you apply Poison. Noxious Fumes applies 2 (3 upgraded) to ALL enemies every turn, so the Skull lifts it 50 percent, to 3 (4 upgraded) per turn, compounding. Then Catalyst doubles the accumulated stack, tripled when upgraded, so the Skull's +1 per application has been multiplying for the whole fight before the double lands. Three pieces, each multiplying the last: percentage relics stacked on percentage cards. This is the cleanest multiplicative chain in the database.
Engine four: banked Stars. Ice Cream conserves energy between turns; Alignment converts Stars into energy (2, or 3 upgraded); Seven Stars spends 7 Stars for 49 area damage. With energy banked and Stars persisting between turns with no cap, a Regent can hold two turns of resources and release them as one Alignment into one Seven Stars, 49 damage plus whatever else the energy funds, on a single turn the enemy never sees coming. Genesis supplying Stars per turn completes the loop.
Study the anti-combos with equal care, because the pool contains traps that cost runs. Ectoplasm deletes gold income, so Membership Card's discount has nothing to discount. Fiddle stops all further draw for the turn, strangling Acrobatics and Prophesize engines. Diamond Diadem wants 2-card turns in a game where Brilliant Scarf wants 5-card turns; owning both means one of them is dead. The rule both directions: before taking any relic, name the card and the other relic it multiplies with. If you cannot name either, you are collecting souvenirs.
Character-Locked Relics: Snecko Skull, Paper Phrog and Emotion Chip
Three relics in the pool are character-restricted, and each one is a build-defining decision rather than a stat stick, because locked relics are priced by how narrowly they multiply one archetype.
Snecko Skull (tier A, Common, Silent) applies 1 additional Poison whenever you apply Poison. The multiplication is per application, not per fight, which is what makes it mandatory for Poison Silent: Noxious Fumes goes from 2 per turn to 3, every Deadly Poison-class card gains a stack, and by the time Catalyst doubles the total, the Skull has quietly contributed more damage than most rare cards. The inverse is equally true: in a Shiv or Sly deck with zero Poison applications, the Skull is a paperweight, so its tier A rating is an average of must-have and dead across two archetypes. When you see it early as Silent, it is a signal to bias your next picks toward Poison enablers, because the relic has already paid half of that archetype's cost.
Paper Phrog (tier A, Uncommon, Ironclad) raises Vulnerable's effect from +50 percent to +75 percent attack damage taken. Vulnerable is a full archetype in StS2, and the Phrog converts it: Bash's single application now amplifies every attack you throw for its duration, Whirlwind's multi-hits each collect the bonus, and the Strength package (Inflame, Demon Form, Limit Break) stacks under it. Bag of Marbles applies 1 Vulnerable to all enemies at combat start, and Phrog turns that free common-slot debuff into a 75 percent damage window on turn one of every fight. The Phrog is the reason an Ironclad with a Bash and two Strength cards should treat Vulnerable uptime as a build resource: with the Phrog in hand, reapplying Vulnerable is worth more than a second Strength power in many fights. Without any Vulnerable source, it does nothing, so check your deck for applications before rating it.
Emotion Chip (Rare, Defect) triggers all orb passives at the start of a turn if you lost HP the previous turn. The design is inverted from most relics: it rewards taking damage, and that shapes which Defect deck wants it. Frost turtle decks try to lose zero HP, so for them the Chip is offline exactly when they are winning, and it is close to dead. Aggressive Lightning decks (Ball Lightning chipping while channeling, Tempest dumping orbs) expect to leak damage against elites, and for them the Chip becomes a second Frost passive tick or a free Lightning trigger every turn. The honest evaluation: Emotion Chip is a tempo relic for tempo Defect and a trap for turtle Defect, and the difference is not the relic, it is the deck you built before it dropped.
Near-locked relics deserve the same reading even though any character can hold them. Razor Tooth and Unceasing Top function as Claw-deck exclusives in practice (they need volume), Brilliant Scarf as a Sly-deck exclusive (it needs five-card turns), Charon's Ashes as an Ironclad Corruption exclusive. Treat relic evaluation as character-relative: the same drop can be tier S for your deck and tier C for your friend's, and the tier list is only ever the starting point of that conversation.
When an S-Tier Relic Is Worth a Detour: Routing Around the Pool
Relics are not distributed evenly across the map, so relic value eventually becomes pathing value, and the detour question (is this relic worth extra floors, extra fights, or extra HP) has a clean answer structure. A detour pays when the relic multiplies two or more subsystems and the remaining run is long enough to collect the interest.
The timing cases first. Black Star before an elite-dense act is the strongest detour trigger in the game: every subsequent elite doubling its relic output converts one extra fight today into two relics per elite for the next ten floors, so a path through one extra elite to reach a Black Star shop or blessing is usually positive expected value if your HP clears the safety rules in our elite guide. Pantograph before a boss-heavy stretch works the same way in reverse: 25 HP per boss refunds greed you would otherwise have to bank, so grabbing it mid-act unlocks the aggressive path. Arcane Scroll (a free random rare card, the runaway community number one) and Yummy Cookie (4 upgrades on pickup) are both take-on-sight wherever they appear, because card quality compounds exactly like relic count.
Shop detours are a separate calculation with a known price list. Membership Card is worth a detour only early, when most of your shop spending is still ahead of you, and its 50 percent discount compounds across every subsequent visit. Brimstone is worth gold the moment your Ironclad is committed to a Strength race, and not one floor before, because enemies gaining +1 Strength per turn is a tax a control deck cannot pay. Alchemical Coffer is a boss-preparation purchase: four filled potion slots turn any boss into four extra turns of answers, and buying it one shop before the Act 3 boss pool (Aeonglass, Test Subject #C10, The Queen) is its ideal window. The general shop rule from the economy guide holds: removal service outranks relics for a bloated deck, relics outrank removal once the deck is clean, and Membership Card outranks both if you will visit three or more shops with it.
Event-based relic pickups follow the event economics. Trash Heap's dig option trades HP for a unique relic from the legacy pool, and the guidance is to dig when healthy, because a unique relic cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the run. Wongo's sells a random common relic, a specific rare, or a ticket paying several relics after a few fights; the ticket or the rare are the picks when rich, and refusing is never an option because it downgrades one of your cards. And the Battleworn Dummy's tiered reward scales with a gamble you should only take conservatively: a relic you can actually win beats a big one you cannot.
Two closing notes for multiplayer. In co-op, relics drop in player-count batches and are drafted one at a time, so detour math becomes team math: the tank should be bidding defense-floor relics (Sai, Anchor, Red Mask) while the burst player bids energy (Lantern, Ice Cream, Ectoplasm). And whatever the mode, keep the detour honest: one extra node for a multiplier is a trade, three nodes for a trinket is a tour. The map screen, not the relic screen, is where the decision is actually made.